What Makes Dark Energy Dark?

Nobody knows exactly what dark energy is, but most theoretical physicists agree that it comprises most of the energy in the universe and is largely responsible for the fact that the universe hasn’t collapsed back in on itself like a deflating balloon. Or as SciShow host Hank Green puts it: “The bottom line is that whatever dark energy, and whatever it’s doing, it’s doing it like crazy.” Actually, Hank’s three-minute description of dark energy is well worth watching in its own right:

SpaceDaily has recently brought attention to the Basilakos-Solá hypothesis, which argues that the quantum vacuum itself, the apparent emptiness of the inert universe, produces the majority of the universe’s energy (and the entirety of dark energy) by way of quantum fluctuations. The idea that there is more energy in the quantum vacuum than we suspect isn’t an especially new one—Einstein’s cosmological constant expressed a very similar idea—but the idea that dark energy could exist in the quantum vacuum not as a constant, but as a very large-scale distribution of quantum fluctuations, is a bold one. (“Nothing,” Paula Solá told the magazine, “is more ‘full’ than the quantum vacuum, since it is full of fluctuations that contribute fundamentally to the values that we observe and measure.”) Basilakos and Solá suggest that dark energy is simply the unrecorded energy crackling in and out of existence all around us—not a strange new form of energy, but an unrecognized expression of what we can already see.

Related Articles

In the preface to an upcoming book, Stephen Hawking remarked that humanity might—at some point in the distant future—be capable of accidentally destroying the universe itself by disrupting the Higgs field: “The Higgs…

What is DARK ENERGY AND WHAT MAKES IT DARK?……….it is the sudden extraction of positive and negative energy that is every living thing. The place where those who die a sudden death not caused by the natural flow of energy exists. It is Not the action of extraction but the effect. Limbo some call it…a place where an energy outside of its self if you will…lives and develops into a more powerful energy than its own creation. What makes it dark…is the manipulation of natural energy and the inability of the human brain to process its existence…. -ME